another chapter

Hello, friends.  I haven’t written new material on the blog in a while because I’ve been working on a book project (more to come on that later….)  In the meantime, here’s another chapter from the book in case you need some reading material….

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When I told Karina the news I’d gotten from my ob/gyn, that my ovaries had shut down and he wanted to do a hysterectomy, she sat down on the couch next to me and gave me a hug. “Sarah, my heart is just breaking for you,” she said.

That night as I laid in my bed alone, staring at the ceiling, I asked God, “Is Your heart breaking, too?” Since my initial diagnosis the year before, I’d had dueling images of God in my head, and I couldn’t reconcile the two. There was the God that Paul wrote about as a commanding officer, “Endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ,” and then there was the God that Matthew described as a Father who wanted to give good gifts to his children.

When God seemed to be silent, I couldn’t tell if He was military officer who was pushing me until I either broke or became stronger, or if He was the loving Father who was aware of every tear I cried, whose heart was breaking for me.

But if He was that loving Father, and if He did know the pain I was in, why wouldn’t He do something? I’d posed that question to the hospital chaplain when I was in sepsis, and she left the room and never came back. A few days after the chaplain left, an oncology social worker from the hospital came to my room to see how I was doing. I was choking on tears before I could finish asking the question, “If God loves me, how can He let me hurt this much?”

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I’ve decided that either God doesn’t exist, or He’s terribly angry with me, or there’s something I’m missing about His character that lets Him love His children but let them suffer at the same time.”

I asked her what she thought, and she launched into her own theory. “I think God is like a giant and we’re like ants,” she said. “I think He tramples some of us, but not because He’s mean, it’s just because we are unfortunate enough to be in His way. I think suffering is a random accident,” she said. Then, honest to God, she patted my hand and walked away, leaving me to wonder what comfort I was supposed to find in randomness.

About six months after I got to Portland, I was kneeling at the communion table at the front of the church asking God the same questions I’d been asking for months. “Who are You? Where are You? And how could You do this to someone You love?” As I was kneeling there in silence, I remembered a night years before, when I was working as a phlebotomist to earn money for grad school.

One night I got called to Pediatrics to draw blood from a 5-year-old girl who was being admitted with newly-diagnosed diabetes. The nurses called me so I could draw blood off of her I.V. instead of having to stick her with a needle a second time. I walked into the room to introduce myself to the patient and her parents, and I immediately recognized the patient’s mom, who was sitting in bed with her little girl. She was a physician on the hospital staff that I had often seen rounding on her patients while I was doing blood draws on the floors.

As the doctor stood against the wall watching, we strapped her daughter onto a papoose board, and started her I.V. When the needle went into her arm, the little girl shrieked. As I collected her blood into vials to take to the lab, she kept screaming. After a few minutes of crying without seeing any results, she lifted her head off the table and screamed, “MOMMY! I’M IN PAIN!”

I watched the doctor’s face, and noted the tears that welled up in her eyes as she watched her daughter continue to struggle against the restraints. But, to her credit, she kept her distance and let us finish the procedure. The moment we were done, the doctor undid the restraints, scooped her daughter up in her arms, and rocked her until she fell asleep. I thought about the paradox of that doctor. The mother in her loved her daughter more than anything, and wanted her child to be healthy and pain-free more than anyone else on the medical team. But the doctor in her knew that the very best thing for her child was an I.V. that could provide life-saving insulin and fluids.

And so, even though it caused her child pain, because the doctor knew it was ultimately in her child’s best interest, she allowed us to inflict pain that the little girl could not understand. But at the soonest possible moment, she was there to pick her daughter up and carry her away from the pain.

And then I thought about the paradox of God. How was it possible that He could seem so far away and yet promise, “I will never leave you or forsake you”? How could life hurt so much when He promised to give me “a future and a hope”? In the light of the woman who was simultaneously a mother and a physician, I began to see God as both my Father and the Great Physician. He was the infinitely loving, infinitely wise Father standing against the Procedure Room wall of life, watching me suffer as tears welled up in His eyes, waiting for the moment when the trial had finished its work in my life, ready to pick me up the second it was done, waiting to carry me home.

That was the last time I asked, Where is God when I’m hurting? Because that day I heard the answer. He’s right here. And He’s been here all along.

I took communion and then walked back to my seat. With hope and relief rising up in my chest, I lifted my hands to heaven as the worship band sang,

The love of God is greater far than tongue or tribe can ever tell

It goes beyond the highest star and reaches to the lowest hell

For two years I had been waiting to be found. And now I realized that all this time, in this lowest hell, through every heartbreak, and in each cry of pain, I had never been lost.

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